← The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
The Dave Gerhardt Show (from Exit Five)
How to Be Great at Marketing Without Being a Subject Matter Expert with Kevin White, Head of Marketing at Common Room
00:47:48
Loading summary
Transcript114 lines
- [00:02]
Dave
Hey.
- [00:02]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
This episode of the Exit 5 podcast is brought to you by Qualified. It's no secret. AI, the hottest topic in marketing right now. And one thing we hear a lot.
- [00:12]
Dave
Of you marketers talking about is how.
- [00:14]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
You can use AI agents to help run your marketing machine. And that's where Qualified comes in with Piper, their AI SDR agent. Piper is the number one AI SDR agent on the market according to G2. And hundreds of companies you've heard of like Box, Asana and Brex, they've hired Piper to autonomously grow inbound pipeline. How good does that sound? Qualified customers are seeing a massive business impact with Piper. A 3x increase in meetings booked and a 2x increase in pipeline. The agentic marketing era has arrived. And if you're a B2B marketing leader looking to scale pipeline generation, Piper, the number one AISDR is here to help. Go and check it out today@qualified.com exit 5 and you can hire Piper, the number one AISDR agent and grow your pipeline too. Who doesn't want more pipeline right now? Come on qualified.com exit5 and we'll see you on the podcast. 1, 2, 3, 4.
- [01:11]
Kevin White
Exit. Exit, exit.
- [01:25]
Dave
All right, Kevin White is here. Kevin is the head of marketing at Common Room. Kevin, good to see you.
- [01:31]
Kevin White
Dave, good to see you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
- [01:34]
Dave
First, let's just set some context here. We're going to talk a little bit about like a recent company shift and creating a new category and coming in as head of marketing. But just to fill people in today, what does Common Room do? Rough, like company size stage, just so people can get a frame for that in their head.
- [01:51]
Kevin White
Yeah, absolutely. So Common Room we call and we get into category creation a little bit, I'm sure is customer intelligence platform. And you're like, okay, what the heck does that mean? So we really see ourselves as a way to help go to market teams work more effectively. How we do that is by capturing a bunch of buying signals from all different breadcrumbs across the Internet and then identifying the person and the account behind those signals and then allowing those go to market teams to take action in a prioritized, efficient way. And then level setting on the company size. We're about 50 people. The marketing team is small and scrappy. We have five people on the marketing team and then also the SDR team reports to the marketing team, which is something I inherited and I'm very happy I did. So that may be something else we can get into. And hundreds of customers, lots of notable Names like Notion, Figma, Zapier. So, yeah, things are going well.
- [02:40]
Dave
And just a brief history of your career, like the two minute version. What have you, what did you do before this?
- [02:45]
Kevin White
Yeah, so I guess I've been in SaaS for a good amount of time, but the things I'm most notable for, if I'm notable for anything, is leading growth marketing segments. Dave and I both had a crossover with Guillaume who worked there, and then Guillaume went to Drift, and so I inherited a lot of the work that Guillaume did and set the framework for. And then after that time period, for three years, I moved on to lead marketing at Retool for a few years and then now at Common Room. So that's the quick nutshell version of my career.
- [03:13]
Dave
Beautiful. All right, good context. We're in the mix now. Everybody's locked in. So, like, after leaving Retool, you kind of did the Marketing Advisor thing for a little bit. And was Common Room one of the companies that you were advised?
- [03:26]
Kevin White
Yeah, Common Room, Ashby, Deepnote, a few others or company.
- [03:30]
Dave
Like, I want to talk about going from Advisor kind of because a lot of people that listen to this have either done something similar or, you know, our audience is people like you and me. And so, yeah, yeah, they are maybe doing that. And I always think it's interesting when I talk to someone who was doing the kind of mini consulting, like either a consulting business or advising a bunch of companies, then oftentimes I see this pattern where you kind of find the best company in your portfolio almost, and it almost like always turns into if it's the right. Yep, that person becomes head of marketing. And it kind of seems like that's what happened with Common Room.
- [04:02]
Kevin White
Yeah, nailed it. That is pretty much what happened. And that's kind of the approach I took where I was like, okay, I know I'm like, not the best fit for retail right now and wanted to go try and find the right company to work for. And typically for an advisory type role, you join 20 hours or 40 hours a week at one company and then like an hour a week for a bunch of others. And I think Common Room was one of the latter there. But what I really saw about Common Room was just like, oh, what they're building is really cool. I can see myself as a subject matter expert and I feel like that I have empathy for the actual audience there. And so that weighed heavily, heavily into my decision because I've been working at a lot of like developer. Even segment is kind of like a developer centric company. Like, we're selling to product managers and like data analytics people. And then retool is like all software engineers and like, I'm not the best subject matter expert in that I can do the right marketing things. But knowing your space and market and feeling confident about that and not having imposter syndrome goes such a long way. And that really weighed into my decision. Plus, I thought they were building a incredible product and clicked with the team. And that's why when I decided to make the leap and just join full.
- [05:08]
Dave
Time, I want to actually go back and talk about something you mentioned there because it's something that comes up a lot. And so I agree with you that as a marketer, if you are interested in marketing and you know the Persona and that's you, it's perfect fit to take a job in that space. But a lot of people give me a hard time for when they listen to this podcast. They're like, oh, you just interview marketers selling to marketing people. I'm like, well, that's kind of. This is a big market. That's where I come from. And I think that's obviously much easier. It doesn't make the job easier, but I mean, like, understanding the Persona. Let's just talk about for people in the other camp. So for you, in past roles, when you're running marketing or if you're in marketing and you are not your customer, have you taken to that in the past? Or like, what advice would you give to somebody? So say you said like, retool is selling to software developers, right?
- [05:56]
Kevin White
Yeah.
- [05:56]
Dave
How do you get into that world? Like, for me in marketing, it's like, oh, I'm listening to those podcasts. I'm reading that stuff. I know that. But when you're not in that world, what's a good playbook or advice for somebody? Hey, I'm not a cybersecurity person, but I'm taking a marketing job at a cyber security place. Like, how do I understand the customer? How do I understand what they're interested in, their likes, et cetera?
- [06:16]
Kevin White
Yeah.
- [06:16]
Dave
How have you figured out in the past what advice would you give to people?
- [06:19]
Kevin White
Yeah, it's hard. It's hard. I mean, I don't think I'm ever going to like, jump in. Especially if you're working at a security company or a developer first company. I don't think I'm ever going to like, jump in and actually, like, learn how to code, get up to speed super fast and like, actually be a subject matter expert. So, like, what's the alternative that you can do to get up to speed. And I think the ultimate thing for me and just for lots of trial and error is using customers as a cheat code. And so if I were a marketer and being placed into one of these situations, I would like ask qualifying questions when you're being interviewed, like, can I get access to customers? Like, what's the culture here of like talking with customers, surveying customers? Because if you don't have that on the marketing side of things, you're just flying blind and guessing and just doing tactics versus actually knowing, like the underlying things and foundations for positioning and messaging. So if you're not a subject matter expert, I would say, you know, just rely on your customers. Your customers are a cheat code. Talk with them, ask them product market fit questions like, what was happening in your world before using this product? What did it unlock? What concerns did you have? Those types of conversations qualitatively just give you so much information that you can use and just copy and paste in your headlines, in your positioning and your messaging on your website. So I found that being customer centric is the workaround to if you're not a subject matter expert yourself. I'll also add onto that too that, you know, it is pretty critical to hire subject matter experts if you can. And there are those types of developers who are evangelists or security people who are even evangelists. And if you can find those people, maybe you don't hire them full time, but if you can find them, that's a really great strategy to fill in the blanks of where you're weak, to find people who are out there and have them, like represent your brand and your voice as a strategy or tactic or whatever you want to call it.
- [08:00]
Dave
Yeah, that's a good point. So the first one is just like, that advice would be timeless. Whether you know the market or not, stay close to your customer. But it's almost like it changes the role in your mind. It's like, okay, I need to be a bit more of a curator and a researcher instead of if you're in marketing, you know that deeply, maybe you're the subject matter expert. You kind of have your takes and perspectives where you're kind of putting on more of like your research hat. And then you mentioned customers. But I'd also say there's also probably people inside of the company too, right? Like that person. You know, those people exist inside of your company either in that job function. And so you sell to hr. You're not an HR expert, but like, can you make your HR team amused for your Content. I think that can be a really good strategy.
- [08:44]
Kevin White
Yeah.
- [08:44]
Dave
And then oftentimes just the product team is maybe more technical. They're going to have to have a different level of knowledge. And so like having real relationships with the product managers and the engineers can also be another thing to add to your toolkit.
- [08:56]
Kevin White
Right? Yeah, you bring up a really good point there that I definitely didn't touch on. But essentially, when you're joining these types of companies, or any company, really just go on a listening tour. But a short listening tour, like the CEO is not going to accept that you're going to do a listening tour for the first 60 days, but quickly get up to speed as much as possible, like internally and with customers. I also think it goes both ways, where there's always someone who you're selling to or typically someone who you're selling to who plays that role inside your company. And so if you can make that person the subject matter expert and up level them and highlight them in a way that's like a, you know, advocate, awareness type of role, like, that's also another really great route versus trying to hire someone externally or use a contractor or influencer or creator, whatever we want to call those people.
- [09:38]
Dave
I like that you mentioned Guillaume, you know, his partner at Hypergrowth, Kanto.
- [09:42]
Kevin White
Yes. I'm actually part of the Hypergrowth, of course, group.
- [09:45]
Dave
Yes, the hypergrowth mafia.
- [09:46]
Kevin White
Yes, yes, yes.
- [09:47]
Dave
So they sold to developers auth0 and they, they. He hired a content team. His content team was former software developers and he was like, hey, I can pay a, like, if you're interested in writing, I can kind of match your, you know, pay your same salary. You can make good money and like write about your craft. And I love that. I think that is what it takes. It's very hard to appeal to an industry if you're not the subject matter expert. So if you hire a bunch of interns or let ChatGPT write your content and you're selling to, you know, an advanced audience like developers, it's going to be pretty hard to fake that. And so that's an expense. Okay. That's a creative use of the marketing budget.
- [10:23]
Kevin White
Right.
- [10:23]
Dave
Maybe you don't have to go and hire eight people like he did, but could you hire one, make them an evangelist, make them a subject matter expert. Like, as the head of marketing, your job is to use the budget. Like your budget is your tool. Right. And you don't have to be an expert on all that content. But you're like, I got a million dollar marketing budget, Whatever. Just Making up a number. Is it worth it to pay someone 250 grand or 200 grand or whatever the number might be to have them like be evangelists and host a podcast? Like my friend Tom Wentworth, who's a CMO at Recorded Future, has done this, where they hired like a former NPR cybersecurity journalist to host their podcast. And that's been a great place. So I love hearing stories like that because I think it just pushes you to think outside the box a little bit. And especially if you're at like a venture backed company like this, you're going to have a budget and you can use it wisely as opposed to like writing kind of shitty ChatGPT content and wondering why your audience of developers is not engaging with that content?
- [11:17]
Kevin White
Yeah, we did that at this other company that I was advising called DeepNote. Actually it was a data science notebook company and went outside to different regions, India and Indonesia. We found, what we did was find writers who were like, oh, we really like that content. And they're doing stuff with the products or similar products that really have like a strong connection to what we're doing and what we want to put out there. And then super simple, just grassroots, like reach out to them. Hey, I'll give you 50 bucks for a post or I'll give you 100 bucks for a post. Can we like see if this works out? The thing I would also add to that is that if you're not an expert, you don't have the editorial oversight or the editorial view. And so you actually do need someone who has that kind of lens of like, okay, we're not going to let this content writer just run wild and then ask for a vig for creating content. We actually need them to go through some sort of editorial process. So that's the one thing where it's like you have quality control internally, but externally that's like a really good route.
- [12:09]
Dave
So anyway, I wanted to circle back on that topic, how to be good at marketing when you're not a subject matter expert. Let's talk about Common Room. So what was the state of the company? Just like how many employees rough stage wise when you came in as head of marketing and how many people were on the marketing team if there was one when you joined?
- [12:27]
Kevin White
Yeah, yeah, so we did have a marketing team and also the stage that we were at. So the company was founded, I think in 2020. I should know this. 2020 or 2021. And then it was during that crazy hype cycle where you got a lot of Funding for not much product and not much actual revenue or customers. And so we actually haven't raised funding in quite a while. And so what we were essentially doing is just trying to grow into that valuation. Yeah, when I joined, there was a marketing team and I had to come in and, like, make some changes, make some hires, fire some agencies, things like that. And the team kind of grew from like, the size of like 30 or 40 to now 50. But we're still in, like, this really scrappy stage where, you know, we need to grow into our valuation and just accelerate and execute to catch up on the revenue side of things to make sure that those, like, numbers square out. And we're like, well on our way to doing that. But the markets flipped really quickly in that time period. And so, yeah, it's been a challenge, but it's also, like, really healthy, I think, for us to think that way. And it's not this growth at all cost phase. And so we really look at marketing from a lens of, like, how can we have the most impact for the least amount of dollars or the least amount of effort and then do a lot of effort to make a huge amount of impact? So, yeah, hopefully that makes sense. But, yeah, it's been kind of a weird thing to navigate with the market the way it is.
- [13:40]
Dave
What types of agencies did you fire?
- [13:43]
Kevin White
Yeah, without naming names.
- [13:45]
Dave
You don't have to name names, but I want to know of, like, what's some of the fat that you came in and trimmed? And the reason why I'm asking is because it's going to be relatable for a lot of people. It's not going to be like, oh, interesting. I've never had to do that.
- [13:56]
Kevin White
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I definitely didn't just come in and be like, we're gonna do a clean sweep here and start from ground zero. I wanted to come in and, like, at least assess where things are. I don't want to completely damage my relationship with the team or anything like that, but the main thing we cut is our content agency. And it wasn't that they weren't producing anything or that they weren't producing anything that wasn't, like, acceptable. It was more just like, this agency isn't embedded in the company and they don't have the same perspective that we have as a brand. And so they're creating SEO content that is. I mean, I hate to say it, but I think, like, ChatGPT could also just do that now at scale. And so there used to be a time when creating that content would work, I think, but I really am allergic to that. Not having a point of view, not putting a flag in the sand and not having a perspective. I think you can still write SEO based content while having a perspective. And so I just. There was no way that we were going to bridge that gap by hiring externally. And I had a really strong point of view on what our positioning and messaging and outwardly content should be. So that's why we ended up making that decision.
- [15:02]
Dave
How many people were on the team?
- [15:03]
Kevin White
Yeah, the team was like three people when I joined and now we have five. So it's a pretty small team.
- [15:08]
Dave
And did everybody stay when you joined?
- [15:10]
Kevin White
No, not everyone stayed. We had to make some decisions that were not easy. But also in the long run, I feel like the people who, you know, we decided to let go, like turned out better for them in the long run because, you know, we hired someone who was not the right person on the boat for the time and needed to make sure we're all like aligned and moving the right direction. And so that is one hard thing that we had to do.
- [15:36]
Dave
Yeah, yeah. I mean it's hard, but it's the reality of doing business. And I feel like if you have that opportunity as a marketing leader and you're coming in, I usually would prefer to have a fresh start.
- [15:46]
Kevin White
Yeah. One other thing I'll say there is that it's not that the person was doing a bad job. In fact, they were doing like a really good job. It was just like this function is not what we need at this time. And so that made it even harder because they were working their ass off and actually shipping and delivering things. And it's like, I could use you in two years. When our company gets to a maturity level where we need this function of PR and analysts and all that kind of stuff. So it's just sometimes the people are at a company at the wrong stage in time.
- [16:17]
Dave
Yeah, I mean I've done that and I've joined a company where it's like I'm just making up an example. But you join a company and you have a limited budget, you can only have a team of like three or four people and that money and budget is tied up today. And two of those people are fantastic people, good at what they do, but what their specialty is is wrong for that stage. And so you have a in house video producer making 150 grand and you don't need videos at that level, but you need that 150 grand back because your pipeline number needs to grow and you'd be better off hiring a demand gen manager. These are the decisions that you have to make. And I wanted to call this out in the podcast because we do have a lot of people who listen to this that are first time marketing leaders or want to be a future marketing leader. And the thing that I didn't realize until later on is like, this is actually the job to be ahead of marketing. This is the job. It's not, we're going to talk about the fun stuff like creating a category and doing the marketing, but it's so much of the team, budget planning, people, management, like understanding who's on the roster. It's, you know, a big part of it is like being the GM of a sports team or something where it's like, hey, you got, you got $100. You can't spend it all on one person or you could that you, you wouldn't have enough resources. You got to figure out like who can you actually get, who's available, what's the right fit and those things. That is so much of the job that I didn't learn until making mistake after mistake after mistake. And I think if you don't know that, you need to start to understand that if you want to be an effective marketing leader.
- [17:45]
Kevin White
Yeah, yeah. I feel like now is the time where you really had to come in and inspect that too. Or you know, when I was at segment of retail, I didn't have to do those things because you know, we're just growing and spending money like crazy.
- [17:55]
Dave
So much spend for sure.
- [17:57]
Kevin White
Yeah, yeah. So I think it's a good forcing function. And now I'm like, okay, if I ever, even if times are good again, I can reflect back and be like, this is what a highly efficient operating team looks like. This is my standard going forward. None of this growth at all costs. We're just going to hire everyone and have feel good type of marketing team. Like that's not where I would make my marketing decisions anymore.
- [18:18]
Dave
All right, so how did you evaluate what types of roles you needed on the team and what type of go to market strategy you were going to deploy? And with that, actually if you could tell us what that strategy is, like, hey, our goals were this and we wanted to do marketing this way. And so we built the team around this model.
- [18:35]
Kevin White
Yeah, yeah. I think what was happening before is just kind of marketing going through the motions without having a leader in place. And so it was like, oh, we're going to do webinars, we're going to do campaigns, we're going to do content. And like these are all things that are pillars and functions of marketing, but not exactly in a cohesive, like strategic way of doing those things. So like there's results and there was things happening, but it was just kind of like marketing by way of shipping things or like feel good things that aren't actually making an impact. So the first thing I wanted to look at is just like, okay, what are the things that we're doing that are driving actual results and not just results like MQLs or top of funnel, like what is happening further down the funnel that we're doing right now that we want to keep investing in? Or what are like the inklings of like this is going to end up working well. And so if you look at it through that lens, it's pretty easy to cut all the stuff that's not working, like events like this content that's getting zero engagement. And so the first thing I did was just kind of like come in and assess and like clean house of the things that weren't working. And that really helps with cutting budget. I mean, I think the first three months that I joined we cut our budget in half, but then increased pipeline by like 30 or 50% the next quarter. And so if you can come in and like just get rid of the things that are taking up resources and time and that unblocks a lot of other things that makes the rest of the productivity go up. So that was like the first order. And when I looked in and inspected like, what is working, I did see that working with our community and the people who are advocates for us and our customers, like, those things tended to perform pretty well. And so we invested in a creator program as a hypothesis to find more people who like our customers who could advocate for us but maybe have a bigger distribution. So that was like one program that we invested in that worked out well. And then on the content side of things, like, I had a hunch that we're selling to marketers and we're selling to go to market sales reps. And those people consume content. They consume video content, they consume content on LinkedIn quite a lot. And so one of the first things I did was get rid of that agency and then hire someone who I trusted and like knew the space really well. And the hypothesis there was like, this content person would help us like have a point of view and also help us get awareness and distribution in the right ways. And so that investment is something that we made. And that channel is not just like blog posts. It's really just like the whole mix of content and how you represent yourself in the channels where your audience is hanging out and that just tends to be LinkedIn. LinkedIn and Slack channels for us is where our audience is hanging out.
- [21:01]
Dave
I'm trying to look it up right now, but what's like the go to market motion for the business? Yeah, book a demo and start for free. But are you selling like to the low end, to the high end to both?
- [21:11]
Kevin White
Yeah, I would say it's like fast growing SaaS companies with a hundred plus more team and then a go to market team. That tends to the ratio there. If you have a hundred people, 100 employees tends to be like at least 10 or 20 on the go to market side. And so those are the companies that get value from Common Room. The motion there is yes, a sign up and connect some signals and start to pull in data so that that go to market team can start to act on it.
- [21:35]
Dave
So you're trying to drive everybody to do that. Is it more of like a drive them to the website, get them to sign up for free? That's how you're measuring success from a funnel standpoint or are you trying to drive, you know like I see like good fit people to book a demo with sales?
- [21:49]
Kevin White
Yeah, yeah, it's more like. So one of the other things that I changed when joining is instead of having MQL as a metric, moving our metric marketing metric to pipeline. And so because of that there are certain things that we would looked at that are driving pipeline. It's people who are hand raisers and then like the right kinds of accounts that are signing up for a self serve version. And oftentimes actually a lot of people kind of mix this up is that the hand raisers, the demo requesters aren't always just coming to your site and hitting request a demo. They're signing up, they're doing some things, they're maybe getting stuck and then raising their hand. So we would see that like a retool actually we saw this. 50% of people who would go through that like self serve motion would actually like in short order in an hour or sometimes in a week would raise their hand and request a demo. So that plg, our self serve acquisition approach actually helps to create more hand raisers and demo requesters. So those two things are the main entry points. Someone signing up for the product who's a good fit. We can offer them a self serve onboarding concierge that helps with getting a call with them. It's like hey, if you have this 15 minute call with us. We're going to help you onboard and like get value to this quickly. That's a good offer. That's not just like, hey, we're going to sell you our product. And then also the people who just come in, they're like, okay, I get this. I'm not going to set it up all on myself. I'm just going to raise my hand and ask for some help. So I think it goes kind of both ways in terms of that mix. But those are the two main channels that we're getting pipeline from.
- [23:09]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
This episode is brought to you by walnut. It's 2025. Something has to change based on how people buy today. Why are we pouring all of this effort into marketing just to hand prospects a PDF or push them behind a book, a demo wall? Come on. Today's buyers, just like you and me, we don't want to wait. We want to explore the product, see how it works and understand its value. Before booking a meeting with someone, I.
- [23:31]
Dave
Want you to show me the product.
- [23:34]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
Come on. 70% of the B2B buying journey is already done before a sales rep is even contacted. So your buying experience needs to match. And that's where Walnut comes in. Walnut helps you put your product the center of your marketing. They make it easy for marketers like you and me to embed interactive demos on the site, drop them in campaigns or personalize them for sales in minutes. No engineers acquired love that is that, is that called vibe coding? Once a buyer is interested, they don't just want a one off walkthrough of your product.
- [24:02]
Dave
They want a place to actually evaluate.
- [24:03]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
Compare notes and make a decision that they feel confident in. So Walnut has deal rooms that make it easy for your internal champion to sell your product to their team. With interactive demos at the core, the result is fewer stall deals. Fewer stall deals, Consistent buyer experiences and intent data that shows exactly what features are winning. That's why companies like Adobe, NetApp and more trust Walnut to shorten sales cycles, scale pre sales and drive millions in new pipeline.
- [24:30]
Dave
Want to see it for yourself? Go check it out.
- [24:32]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
Walnut IO. That's Walnut IO and they have a.
- [24:36]
Dave
Cool offer for you.
- [24:37]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
They will actually build your first demo for free so you can see how demos and deal rooms actually work. So you get to see the product, test it out.
- [24:44]
Dave
They're going to do it for free.
- [24:45]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
Because we're sending you there from exit 5. So go to Walnut I.O. today and tell them that you heard about them from Exit 5.
- [24:53]
Dave
How does marketing drive pipeline from those two channels.
- [24:57]
Kevin White
Can you be a little bit more specific with that question? I mean, there's like, awareness, distribution types of things that we're doing.
- [25:04]
Dave
But I want to know the plays that you're running. I want to know how you're actually doing that. It's like, hey, we got two funnels. We just exist. Yeah, talk to our customers, we got subject matter experts, and we just magically get pipeline. I want to know the tactics, some of the plays you're actually running.
- [25:19]
Kevin White
Let me just hit on the tactics that are working well for us right now. And a bunch of this did take some trial and error. So one of the core programs that's working really well to driving top of Funnel, both signups and demo requests is our LinkedIn creator program. What we did there to make that work is find people who are talking about signals. They're talking about go to market consolidation. They're talking about the things that our product can help out with. They typically have a good amount of distribution. And we just tapped into them and said, hey, can we sponsor you, partner with you to write about how what you're saying, like, Common Room can actually help out with and mention Common Room and, like, drive people to check us out? And so that is something that is really hard to attribute.
- [26:02]
Dave
How did you find those people? How did you find them?
- [26:04]
Kevin White
You just have to be immersed in the channels where your audience is like, we know those people. On LinkedIn, there's not like some magic platform for finding creators and influencers. I think on the B2C side, maybe there is, but on the B2B side, it's just being immersed in the channels where your audience is at is where to find the people who you can, like, start to work with because they show up. And you just know that from being in there.
- [26:23]
Dave
So is that mainly LinkedIn for you guys?
- [26:25]
Kevin White
Mainly LinkedIn, main LinkedIn, some TikTok and some, like, newsletters, some substack newsletters. And some people have like the full stack where it's like, I have a substack and I also have a strong LinkedIn presence and I also have a podcast. And then they package it up like that too. So you can kind of hit people on all fronts. And then one thing I wanted to get to, it's kind of an important point, I think, is that if you look at that from a pure ROI linear lens, it's really hard to attribute because no one reads this post on LinkedIn or reads this newsletter and clicks the link with UTM and then signs up for your product and so you can have this perfect attribution to this person. So essentially we just had to look at the mix of we're investing in this, we're seeing a lot of impressions and a lot of reactions here. How is that correlated with what we're seeing in terms of top of funnel? And we did implement a self reported attribution on our site. And it's crazy how much self reported attribution. People say LinkedIn, they say the influencer name, they say these things that are like, okay, we know this came from this program, but it looks like direct traffic, organic traffic. It is absolutely not the same as what people infer that they're being influenced by.
- [27:28]
Dave
I could talk about this for hours.
- [27:30]
Kevin White
I know I opened a new can of worms.
- [27:33]
Dave
No, this is amazing. And people that are listening to this, you should go and listen to Rand Fishkin on marketing against the Grain with Kip and Kieran. He talked about basically just how marketing gets done today and how initially all these social media platforms would drive this beautifully trackable referral traffic back to you. But now either that stuff gets all stripped out or they don't. If you've ever actually clicked on a Link on a LinkedIn post, do you know what it says? It says, are you sure you want to leave this site? And then you have to click again. So that adds friction on top of that post with a link. I forget there is a stat on this. It's like five to six times less reach when a post has a link in it. And so if you're going to do something with an influencer or a sponsor and your whole measure for success is how many people signed up through this. I give Kevin, I identify Kevin as an influencer. I want to do a campaign with him. I give him this UTM link, I want him to post the link and then I go and I see that there's been zero signups through that UTM link. Like, of course you're not going to be successful with that. But anyway, in this podcast Ran talks about how we've gotten so used to measuring everything, marketers are going to actually have to go back to doing more what you did, which is like time series based measurement. I forget what he called it. But like, hey, we ran these campaigns with these influencers over this time, over these 30 days, did we see a spike in signups compared to this other time? And then also what you mentioned doing, which is adding the self reported attribution and some people don't like that because it's not perfect data but you're really just trying to, like, you know, lick your finger, check which direction the wind is going and saying, like, is this working? Should we do more of this?
- [29:10]
Kevin White
Right, Yeah. I love that time series attribution. That's a good coin buzzword there. Also another Spark Tour person shout out to SparkToro. I guess Amanda had this post on zero click content, which is kind of what you're talking about is like, if you click LinkedIn doesn't reward that. And so if you write content that is just giving everything away on a LinkedIn post versus trying to get someone to click and, like, go to your site and track them, that content tends to perform a lot better. You just have to be okay and accept that. Like, you're not gonna be able to attribute that to anything.
- [29:41]
Dave
Yeah, I like that. And I also like what you said about finding influencers, which is like, knowing what's going on in industry. Okay, so that's been one play. You've identified a bunch of influencers, you make a list of them and you just reach out. And how do you figure out what they should write about? Is it like, around a product launch? Is just some kind of, like, general thing about Common Room? What's the offer? Because I feel like that also matters a lot too, is a relevant offer to get these people to promote.
- [30:05]
Kevin White
Yeah, this is a really key point, actually, and that we've learned through trial and error is that everyone has their own. I'm sure you, Dave, have your own. Like, these are the topics I talk about. Here's like, my angle on things. Here's what I feel comfortable with. And so I feel like I don't know how many people actually get hung up by this, where they're like, I must force my brand message in this boilerplate into this influencer's feed. But we certainly, like, didn't take that approach. It's more like, okay, this influencer is talking about a lot of the things that we're super aligned with. And it's also opinionated. And so let's work with them to come up with, like, show them our product, show them what we do, and then have them, you know, workshop an angle for it. And if it's not going to be authentic, if the post is not going to be authentic to the person who's posting it, then it's not going to get the distribution that you're looking for and people are going to see right through it. Not that we're trying to, like, you know, do a bait and switch on people. Like, we're very upfront and open when there's a post that's mentioning us. But you know, the content still has to be valuable and still has to cause people to. Either I like to think about it in two ways. It causes people to think and be like, oh, I didn't think about those things that way. And maybe my world or my paradigm has shifted a little bit now. Or it's super helpful and super useful for me to like take this and take action on it. Tend to create content around those two different types of buckets.
- [31:16]
Dave
So it's interesting. So I did a before, like really going and building Exit 5, I kind of did two years on my own as a solopreneur and was doing like marketing advising. And then I had this paid community that has now become Exit 5 and brands started to reach out to me because I have a big following on LinkedIn and a voice there. They sort of reach out to me to do stuff like this. Like I would be on that list for an influencer campaign, for example, and I would do, you know, one off posts or whatever. But now that I'm building Exit 5, we bundle them all into other sponsorships. And so I don't just do like a one off post. It's gotta be like Common Room becomes an Exit five sponsor. Which you should, by the way. Common room becomes an Exit 5 sponsor with that. It's like, oh, they get three months of podcast advertising. We do a webinar together, and then I might do a promoted post on LinkedIn. But now what's cool is we have a team of five people. And what we're doing is when you do that with us, each one of the people on our team is posting. And so we're doing this kind of micro influencer campaign which is like you're going to get not just me, but five people. And then I have found exactly what you mentioned, that the best performing stuff is when it's really related to our course. Surprise. Right? But when it's really related to our core audience. And so like this one company, Goldcast, is a sponsor right now and we use their product for our webinars. And when I do an ad for them, it's a actual clip from the webinar me talking about how we use the webinar product. It's a clip that was used with their AI content lab. And then if I just post that, it's not going to work. But if I write something about like, here's why I think most webinars stink and here's what you can do about it and talk about a bigger trend and then do good writing to actually connect the dots and then talk about the product. That's when that stuff works really well. But I've even found working with some early sponsors, and I'm mentioning this because I know a lot of people out here are doing influencer campaigns in B2B like you're talking about. I think you really have to work with them to create the right copy. I think if you just send to somebody like here's the copy for Common Room, we want you to post on LinkedIn on July 7, it's not going to work totally. If you really treat it like a piece of creative and sweat the copy and write a good hook, have a good offer, then it's going to work. It's just like anything else in marketing, right?
- [33:24]
Kevin White
Yeah, like anything. It's the effort that you put into. I have actually another fun anecdote for a creator program which I didn't even realize until I. You just brought it up in my. You reminded me of is that one of the creators that we worked with, his name is Florin, he saw the product and was like, I really want to be your creator. He actually came to us and raised his hand. And then by onboarding him onto our product and also having him post about it, he was getting enough traction and saw enough value there that when we had a role open, he's a SDR leader and an influencer in that space. And so when we had a role open, we actually hired him to lead our SDR team. And so now he's come in and is, well, we don't have to pay him anymore for posting on our behalf, which is kind of nice. But then also he's using our product and then evangelizing what our product can do and how it's helping his team and how that team is dogfooding the products like get the right kind of results. So yeah, maybe not the best hiring tactic, but that does happen sometimes.
- [34:16]
Dave
What else is in your revenue generating bucket? What are you trying to do to drive pipeline in the short term other than the influencer stuff?
- [34:22]
Kevin White
I would say the other thing is kind of what I just talked about is dog fooding our own product. And so not to like pitch Common Room too much, but no, you can.
- [34:30]
Dave
Because actually I do want to talk about this signal based approach to marketing. So maybe let's segue.
- [34:35]
Kevin White
Yeah, yeah, yeah, happy to segue in that too. So yeah, what our SDR team is doing is actually using our products and so what they're doing is like, there's lots of signals happening all over the place, buying signals that could be acted on. And so those are things like website visits, Those are things like people posting, like our creators posting on LinkedIn and people reacting to those posts and commenting on those posts. There's things like our PLG motion, like people signing up for our product, connecting integrations. And so what we've done is aggregate all of those signals into our platform common room. And then the other thing that they're doing, our SDR team is doing is prioritizing based on our icp. So they're saying like, okay, the signal of a product sign up is great, but then we also need to layer on, is this an economic buyer? Is this person a sales leader? Do they fit the criteria? That would be someone who could get a lot of value from our product. And then once they have those two things, then they have the context of like what actions happened in the past, the motives or the assumptions of like what this person or this account is looking for. And then they can run their own SDR plays, outbound plays accordingly. And so when you combine those things, you get a ton more better results in terms of both velocity and conversion to pipeline than you would with just pure cold outbound, like finding an icp, finding an ABM account, and just trying to get into one of those accounts. So that approach for us is working really well. And one of the goals that we had when hiring Florin is can we get our entire team just using signals? Only if it works? Of course we're not going to do something that doesn't actually generate pipeline, but we found that there's enough signals here and enough scale here that that team can purely just be doing the same signals based approach to generating pipeline.
- [36:15]
Dave
What role does signal based marketing play in the world today? It's a different era that we're coming into from a marketing standpoint where there's a lot more tools, there's a lot more competition, there's a lot of people that have come on here. There's some people love intent data, some people don't. They say some of it is outdated. Like Dave happened to read some article and that counts as intent. We're all trying to circle around intent signals. What is it? How do you do it? Especially in a world where like privacy is becoming more of a thing. Cookies are going away for a lot of people. Can you talk to some of like the. Just the overall trend of why this is important, why now?
- [36:54]
Kevin White
Yeah, yeah. So just like Many things in marketing like ABM for example, like signal based marketing or signal based anything has been around forever like 10 years ago. It used to be more in control of it on the marketing side where it's like okay, we know who's hitting our website, we know who's filling out our form, we know who's downloading and consuming content, who's opening emails, who's raising their hand for a demo request, who's doing a chat via Drift. Right. So these are all signals, but they were just all signals that were only trackable by a marketing automation platform essentially. And so with the buyer journey changing, product led growth, people self serving into a product, tapping into different places like LinkedIn, like Slack communities, like open source, there's just so much surface area now where these buying signals, and I like to call them like digital breadcrumbs, where people are leaving traces of like there's a potential signal here that's putting me in market or making me have interest in like this category. And so I think that signals haven't changed in terms of like we're going to take action on something that a user did or a person did. It's just the surface area has kind of exploded to all these areas. And so that's why I think this like term of like signal based go to market is catching on is it's just like it's not the traditional marketing funnel, it's. The funnel is now expanded to 70 to 100% of it is happening outside of your own purview, but you can see it, you're just blind to it. So now it's just like can we pull in all those signals and can we like score them or can we pass them over to our sales team so that they can take action on them? And it maybe doesn't mean that the person is like raising their hand or opting in. So there is like a privacy concern there kind of. Or I would say definitely. And so it's just kind of working with some companies have higher appetite for doing colder signal based outbound than others. And so yeah, I think the main thing is just the buyer journey has changed and now the way to take action efficiently to drive pipeline and drive revenue takes a different approach and maybe a different tech stack to be able to have a good idea of where all those things are happening.
- [38:51]
Dave
So is your vision that if you're a marketing leader, you see a world where like you want somebody to get, okay, you're gonna do marketing, you would wanna get a tool like common Room to like Put that in your funnel and then you're gonna run your marketing plays around these signals that you're getting.
- [39:07]
Kevin White
Yeah. Yes. But people always ask, like, how do I get started? And I'm, you know, I am biased. But, like, you don't need technology, you don't need a software to do all this stuff. The approach or the thing I mentioned of the play that's working well for our team is, you know, look at these different creator posts, look at our own internal posts, look at posts from our competitors on LinkedIn. The people who comment and react to those. If we run a play against that, and that play gets about 120% higher conversion than just like our normal ABM type approach. And so you can do all that stuff on LinkedIn or on whatever channel yourself. Like people, it's all Google search away, it's all publicly available. You can scour the different people who are reacting to those things on LinkedIn. And yes, tools can help you aggregate and take action on it in a much easier fashion. But I like to have people start, you can do this all with just an Internet connection and a spreadsheet. And so I would say, like, you don't need to start with a platform. Just like, go out there, have a hypothesis, try something that. And when it starts working, then start to add on the technology and the scale side of things.
- [40:05]
Dave
What would be a hypothesis? Like, what signals would somebody be looking for and what's even possible to get?
- [40:11]
Kevin White
Yeah, so this is also like the number one question or one of the number one questions I get, and I have a terrible answer for it, which is it depends. So it depends on a lot of different things, like what's your go to market motion? Are you product led? Are you open source? Are there people visiting your website? Do you have a lot of brand awareness? And so there's probably thousands of signals out there that you could potentially use and take action on. And so I like to try and lay out, group them together. I actually have a spreadsheet which maybe we can share in the show notes. It's like, here's a hundred signals and here's how they're categorized. And from there you can sort of like filter and figure out like, okay, these are applicable to me, or these are not. So if you're not open source, you can weed those out. If you're not plg, you can weed those out. And so essentially, when giving guidance on signal selection and executing on signals, it's really about trying to figure out a dozen or so that you can take action on or that you have a good hunch about. And then from there there's like two other things that are part of the signal selection process. One is what volume do you see or what volume do you expect to see from these signals? An example of that would be like website visits. You know, you have 30,000 website visits a month or a thousand to the pricing page or whatever. So you know, the volume there. And then the other hypothesis or the other factor into like signal selection is what is the conversion rate from like acting on that signal to the next stage in the funnel, which is typically like a demo call request, like your SDR or someone took action and started reaching out to this person who showed the signal, did they take the next step to book a meeting or respond to an email or whatever? And so when you have those two different vectors, the volume and the conversion rate, then you can stack rank all those dozen or so signals that you're hypothesizing on and then start to do those things that don't scale and take kind of like a crawl, walk, run approach to. Okay, we're going to execute on this signal. We're going to see if it's moving to pipeline or converting to pipeline or whatever the next step is in the way that we anticipated and if it's working, like let's figure out how to.
- [42:09]
Dave
Scale that, like eating your own dog food, using your own product. What have been some of the best signals for your team internally?
- [42:15]
Kevin White
Yeah, for my team. And I have another anecdote for something outside of my team that's kind of fun to share. But for my team, it's three different cohorts of signals. So the first one is that social engagement. We call it social engagement. It's essentially people who are. I've talked about this too much already. It's the people who are engaging on LinkedIn. The second signal is PLG. So we have a self serve motion. There's people who are in our ICP who are signing up for our product. They're.
- [42:38]
Dave
Well, wait, wait, can we talk about LinkedIn? What signals are you measuring? Is it monitoring conversations on social? I'm interested in hearing about that.
- [42:46]
Kevin White
Oh yeah, let's do it from your perspective, Dave. So Dave posts something on LinkedIn. It's relevant. It's maybe like the follow up to this podcast about signal based go to market. Okay, a bunch of people comment on that. Like, I tried this, I didn't try this. What do you think about this vendor? What do you think about intent? What do you think about intent? Platforms what do you think about website tracking platforms? Whatever people are engaging with that post. And so all those people who are actually interested in this topic are signaling, pun intended, that they might be in market for your product. So we'll ingest that. Well, you can do that manually by just combing through all the comments, but we'll ingest that post into Common Room and then our SDR team will run plays that are saying, like referencing the post in dynamically in email, referencing quotes from other people who have commented things, and then following up with those people who are in our ICP to book the next step. So that play is working really well. And it could be an influencer post, it could be one of our competitors posting something, it could be one of our internal team members posting something. And if it gets enough traction and distribution on LinkedIn, then that gives us enough signal to pull into Common Room.
- [43:49]
Dave
Can it identify like any post or is basically when you connect it to Common Room, you select accounts or something. So it knows.
- [43:56]
Kevin White
Yeah, LinkedIn works in a couple of different ways, but you can connect to your company page and like pull in that via API. But the thing that's working really well is actually ingesting data from any post.
- [44:05]
Dave
Interesting. And so could you go into Common Room and search for terms and see what's coming up? Like, it's like a social listening tool.
- [44:12]
Kevin White
Yeah, it's kind of like social listening. It's a little different. Yeah, you can search for keywords, you can search for a number of reactions, comments, whatever per post. Like, there's all sorts of ways to slice and dice it.
- [44:22]
Dave
Have you played with SparkToro at all?
- [44:24]
Kevin White
I have. It's been a few years and I didn't like, get it to a place where I could use it to identify the right kind of. I was using it for a Twitter use case and so I didn't like quite get there. But I recently listened to the Rand podcast and I don't know if it was from you or also from Marketing against the Ran. I consume a lot of marketing podcasts, but I was like, I should re look at this thing now because it seems like they probably made a lot of improvements.
- [44:45]
Dave
I wish there was just like a magic social listening tool. The problem is with each platform, you know, it's different APIs, different levels of access to data. But that would be the dream marketing tool, is to be able to understand who's talking about which topics across channels. I found I've used SparkToro and I think it's cool, but I found it the results to be a little bit more generic than what I wanted. Like, if you search for B2B marketing, you're going to get like a bunch of kind of older podcasts that I don't think are that relevant. I'd love to be able to like say, who's talking about signal based marketing on LinkedIn and get that universe. That'd be amazing.
- [45:21]
Kevin White
Yeah, LinkedIn search for it really doesn't work super well.
- [45:25]
Dave
So you just have to like, oh, it's brutal. Yeah, yeah.
- [45:26]
Kevin White
Follow the right kind of people, I guess. And then like it comes in your algorithm. But I see stuff, I'm like, I wish this would have showed in my feed and why I didn't it. It's like, these are all the things I care about. It's frustrating for sure.
- [45:36]
Dave
All right, it was great. All right, go find Kevin, Kevin white. Go to LinkedIn, check him out. Go check out Common Room if you're interested in. Sounds interesting. I think you're all at the intersection of like this kind of newer wave of tools for B2B marketers where the old way of doing marketing and thinking about marketing is changing and even just how you're using influencers versus just like, yeah, we're writing a bunch of articles and trying to rank for keywords to drive demand for our product is interesting. So, Kevin, good to see you. I'm going to be continuing to follow you all at Common Room, see what you're up to and maybe we'll have you back on in the future.
- [46:09]
Kevin White
Right? Sounds good. Yeah, thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me. All right, Exit. Exit.
- [46:39]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails, well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't.
- [47:04]
Dave
That's why we love knack here at exit 5.
- [47:06]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
Knack is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performing emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nac. If you're tired of hoping the email you sent looks good across all devices.
- [47:21]
Dave
Just test it in Knack first.
- [47:23]
Exit 5 Podcast Host
And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part. Everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see NAC in action at nac.com. exit 5. That's KN Exit 5. Or just let them know you heard about knack from Exit 5.
- [47:46]
Dave
That's us.